The present disclosure relates to an image forming apparatus such as a photocopier or multi-function peripheral that scans a document image, and forms images based on the scanned image data.
An image forming apparatus such as a photocopier or multi-function device is configured to scan a document image, compress and temporarily store scanned image data in a storage portion, and form an image based on the image data stored in the storage portion.
The storage device that temporarily stores compressed image data may be a hard disk drive (HDD) using a magnetic disk or a solid-state drive (SSD) using semiconductor memory.
However, HDDs, being structured to write data to an internal magnetic device using a head, have low vibration resistance. Consequently, when using an HDD as the storage portion that temporarily stores image data, vibration can cause write errors in the image data, which lowers the data transfer speed. Thus, there is a risk that a required data speed (transfer rate) may not be satisfied due to mechanical vibrations during copy operations (vibrations produced by the revolution of the motor, the feeding of documents or copy sheets, and the like).
In contrast, SSDs are highly vibration resistant as compared to HDDs. Consequently, when using an SSD as the storage portion that temporarily stores image data, vibration does not result in a lowered data transfer rate. However, since SSDs have a higher cost-per-bit of data compared to HDDs, and since there is a limit on the number of available rewrites, SSDs lead to higher apparatus costs and running costs.